Products

BERNSTEIN, Michele. All The King's Horses. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2008. First Edition in English. 228x152mm. Trade Paperback. Almost Fine. 143pp. Author's first novel, translated by John Kelsey. All the King's Horses is one of the odder, more elusive, and revealing documents of the Situationist International. Written at the instigation of her first husband Guy Debord, Bernstein agreed to write a potboiler to -- allegedly--help swell the group's coffers. She turned it instead into a witty and sensitive, yet anything but sincere, youth novel at once glamourizing and lampooning their own Parisian cultural environment.

Washington: Edge Books, 2005. First Edition. 8vo. 78pp. Perfect bound into printed wrappers. New. Surveying the Bush-era cultural landscape and not liking what it sees, the poetry herein confronts that reality in terms disgusted ("The group is/an asshole./Self-censorship/is the American avant-garde") and terrifying ("Dreamt I was chopping off fingers/of mine with audience. Not cool"), encompassing odd disclosure ("I don't want my brother to get a job ever") and biting satire ("Osama passes/George the bong/bitching about 21st century/hydroponic weed"). And yet, even if we are all just "Trained Meat," as the title of one poem suggests, the work here never gives in to despair; we may be "under attack/in mourning/all at once" but we also "better make//room for each/grief letting/me see what/lines and/lies/not to take/and how/moment/by moment/to be." A fantastic and necessary book.

BERRIGAN, Anselm. To Hell With Sleep. Chicago: Letter Machine Editions, 2008. First Edition. 8vo. Perfect bound into Wrappers. New. 27pp. To Hell With Sleep was written by the poet in the first months after the birth of his daughter, mostly during brief periods of time when he was half-awake or less so, letting the poetry be unthought within its vehicle of eight seven-line slanting stanzas per session, of which there were nine. The impulse driving the writing was to let sounds-turning-toward-words follow from the intensified state of consciousness the arrival of this baby initiated. No prescience, reflection, computer tricks, formal appropriation, or plotting of any kind was used in the writing of this work. Joy, fear, humor, sound, bafflement and recognition-in-exchange-for-recognition were the instruments.

BERRIGAN, Ted. A Certain Slant of Sunlight. Oakland: O Books, 1988. First Edition. 8vo. Perfect bound into Wrappers. Almost Fine. np. With an introduction by Alice Notley. A posthumously published collection of "postcard poems" composed on a series of 500 blank postcards measuring 4.5 by 7 inches. Berrigan died six months after the last of the postcards had been composed.

BERRIGAN, Ted. Many Happy Returns. New York: Corinth Books, 1969. First Edition. 8vo. Perfect bound into Wrappers. Very Good 47pp. One of 1450 [of 1500] copies. This copy is gently shelfworn, and has a little browning to the outer page edges. Otherwise a lovely copy of a lovely book. Contains Berrigan's classic long poem "Tambourine Life".

San Francisco: Angel Hair Magazine, 1967. Limited Edition. 8vo. Folded broadside. One of 200 copies printed by Grabhorn-Hoyem, for Anne Waldman and Lewis Warsh December 25, 1967. This copy has been signed by Ted Berrigan and has two corrections to the text in the same ink. A scarce item containing the poem that would later bear the title of one of Berrigan's full-length collections.

Chicago: The Yello Press, 1976. First Edition. 8vo. 73pp. Perfect bound into wrappers. Very Good, with some mild shelfwear. This copy has been inscribed by Berrigan on the half-title page "To Frank Prince / at / 101 St. Mark's Pl. / N.Y.C. / w/ affection / + / admiration, / Ted Berrigan." Frank Prince (F.T. Prince) was a Shakespearean scholar and poet who's work Berrigan 'dicovered' and promoted. As Ron Padgett describes in his memoir Ted: "Another undercelbrated poet Ted "discovered" was F.T. Prince. He had found a few of Prince's poems somewhere, and then gotten hold of the newly published English edition of Doors of Stone, probably at teh Gotham Bookmart. The tantalizingly few biographical details on the book's dustjacket made Prince even more mysterious. Ted and I figured out that Prince was a hoax, that someone had invented him and that his name gave a phonetic clue: F.T. Prince = footprints. Suddenly Ted had created, among five or ten of us, tremendous interest in Prince's work." (page 86). An interesting and unique association copy.

Berkeley: Blue Wind Press, 1980. First Wraps Edition, issued simultaneously with the hardcover. 8vo. 403pp. Some light shelfwear to the wrappers, and light creasing to the spine, otherwise a fine copy of this excellent selection of Berrigan's work.

Berkeley: Blue Wind Press, 2003. Reissue. 8vo. Trade Paperback. New 403pp. Originally published a few years before Berrigan's death in 1983, this major collection, thought of by the poet himself "as much as possible of The Story So Far" becomes in many ways "The Story."

New York: Grove Press, 1964. First Trade Edition. First Printing. 12mo. 72pp. Stapled into printed stiff-paper wrappers.Almost Fine, with some faint wear at the outer extremities of the wrappers. Likely one of the most important books of postmodern poetry to come out of North America in the 20th Century.

BERRIGAN, Ted. Train Ride. New York: Vehicle Editions, 1971. Limited Edition. 177x127mm. Perfect 79]bound into Wrappers. Almost Fine. np. One of 1474 [of 1500] copies bound into printed wrappers with cover illustration by Joe Brainard. Consists of a long rambling poem written by Berrigan on a train ride on February 18th, 1971 from New York to Providence. Covers were cut a little short exposing the tail edge of the red endpages, otherwise a bright fine copy.

New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1972. First Edition. 8vo. 69pp. Hardcover in Dustjacket. Book is Very Good, with some faint shelfwear; Dustjacket is worn at the outer extremities, with some dustsoil and faint staining to the rear panel. Berryman's last volume of poetry, published posthumously.

Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004. First Wraps. 4to. 857pp. Fine, but for one page which is creased at the upper outside corner. The complete correspondence of almost 500 letters between two important and influential American poets of the postwar period. Includes appendixes and index.

Toronto: Underwhich Editions, 1984. Limited Edition. 8vo. Stapled Wrappers. Fine / Fine. np [12 pages]. One of 250 numbered [#120] copies stapled into printed wrappers, with separate dustjacket. Book designed by John Elmslie. This is the third book issued by the press.